- ATI Radeon 9700 Pro IQ Comparison

Date:: Tuesday , September 03, 2002
Category:: GPU / Video Cards
Manufacturers:: ATI
Author:: Brent Justice

ATI Radeon 9700 Pro IQ Comparison

We’ve run hundreds of benchmarks on the Radeon 9700 Pro, and now it’s time to take an in-depth look into IQ, video, drivers, and even overclocking.

Introduction

You've most likely heard of ATI’s new Radeon 9700 Pro video card by now. If you haven't for some reason, take a look at our ATI Radeon 9700 White Paper article. It will go over what the Radeon 9700 is bringing to the table. You can also check out our subjective article on gaming with a Radeon 9700. Lastly, you can read our most recent review of the Radeon 9700 Pro loaded with real benchmark numbers for your viewing pleasure.

In that review, we found gaming with the Radeon 9700 Pro to be pure sweetness. We can now legitimately run at high resolutions with 4X AA and 16X Anisotropy. What we found most noticeable, however, is the fact that we are now limited by CPU speed with this new card. It's so fast that even current CPUs severely limit its overall performance in certain situations. Even with those CPU limitations, we're finding it great to be able to play a game at high resolutions with all the image quality features turned up and still enjoy great gameplay.

In this second, more in-depth look into the Radeon 9700 Pro, we are going to dive in much deeper to see what else, besides great performance, the Radeon 9700 Pro can do for you. We'll start out with a driver overview, showing you how the drivers compare to the previous Radeon 8500, as well as what kind of Direct3D and OpenGL support it has. We'll also focus on image quality comparisons between two other video cards. Video tests will be done to gauge DVD playback ability as well as this new fangled VIDEOSHADER technology. We'll even do a little overclocking to see if we can squeeze a little more performance out of this beast. Let's get started.

Drivers

ATI and drivers are two things that in the past didn't fit together well at all. When the Radeon 8500 was released back in late 2001, it shipped with one of its most talked about features missing, SMOOTHVISION. The first driver release to ship with the Radeon 8500 did not support the method of Anti-Aliasing ATI was promoting at its launch. It took about a month for drivers to be released that actually supported all of the features on the Radeon 8500. Since that time, ATI's driver support has taken a monstrous steps forward. Long gone are the big pains we had with ATI drivers, and the performance is finally there. With the introduction of the Catalyst drivers, ATI made another step forward in bringing together a unified driver architecture as well as some new control panel features. You'll be happy to hear that the drivers shipped with the Radeon 9700 support all of its features right out of the box.

Direct3D:

One thing you do need to be aware of is that the drivers that ship with the Radeon 9700 Pro are full DirectX 8.1 drivers. DirectX 9 drivers will not be released until Microsoft actually releases DirectX 9. Once that happens, you can bet ATI will be ready to give us DirectX 9 drivers to fully utilize DirectX 9 features. DX9 games and benchmarks, however, are pretty sparse to non-existent right now. Here are three screenshots showing all of the DX 8.1 Caps supported by the Radeon 9700 Pro. Remember, when DX9 is released with DX9 drivers, those capabilities will be available.

OpenGL:

To examine OpenGL properties, we used a program called GLInfo which will detect all OpenGL extensions and capabilities with the drivers. The version of driver we're testing with has the OpenGL ICD version 1.3.3302 for WinXP release and detects the card as Radeon 9700 Pro x86/SSE2 capable.

The first screenshot is from GLInfo describing the OpenGL capabilities of this card. In the second screenshot, we compare the OpenGL extensions between the Radeon 9700 Pro, Radeon 8500, and GeForce4 Ti 4600.

Driver Installation

I wanted to try the Catalyst 2.2 drivers from ATI’s site Build 6.13.10.6118 just to see if they would install. I was greeted with the error message below, proving that those drivers do not in fact work with the Radeon 9700. I even tried forcing them from the device manager, it was a no go.

Thankfully the Radeon 9700 Pro does ship with the drivers that you'll need for it. I guess ATI just hasn't gotten the Radeon 9700 Pro drivers up on their website yet; something they will eventually do. For this article, we got a hold of an unreleased beta driver that's currently the latest version in testing. The driver is Build 6.13.10.6159 with a Packaging Version of 7.76. We also got a hold of the latest control panel which is Build 6.13.10.3019. This is in comparison to 6.13.10.3017 that's available from ATI’s website. Yes, the drivers are still separated from the control panel. You must install the drivers first, and then the control panel. Below are screenshots of the control panel for the Radeon 9700.

As you can see, the DAC is at 400MHz. In fact, it has two of them for dual CRT support. You'll notice in the Direct3D and OpenGL control panels that with Smoothvision II you now have the options of 2X, 4X, and 6X Anti-Aliasing. The options for 3X and 5X Anti-Aliasing that the Radeon 8500 included have been removed, which makes things a bit more simple for the average user to understand. Also notice the Performance and Quality anisotropic filtering options. We'll go into all of that in this article. Yes, the driver rotation tab is there as well if you like to flip your screen upside down or sideways.

We did have one oddity that I wasn’t quite sure what to make of. I haven’t exactly seen this happen before when installing a video card, even a card with two DACs and a TMDS. The device manager detects two Radeon 9700 cards. I experienced no problems, it was just something I haven’t seen a card do before. I looked into the details and found the difference seemed to be that the first entry had an IRQ while the second one only had memory ranges. I also noticed that the first entry said it was on PCI bus 1, device 0, function 0, while the second entry said it was on PCI bus 1, device 0, function 1. I’m not sure why it detected it like this, but I did not notice any problems. If anyone has an explanation as to why this card does this, I would definitely like to know for future reference.